Modern LEDs have many advantages over incandescent or other kind of light sources, including lower energy consumption, longer lifetime, improved physical robustness, smaller size, and faster switching. Costs are decreasing rapidly due to mass production and improving technology.
Modern LEDs are sometimes provided on LED strips. An initial technical problem lies in the interconnection of such LED strips, generally requiring dedicated hardware. For industrial or domestic or even artistic lighting, there is a need for methods and systems of interconnecting such LED strips, and, once interconnected, to appropriately control such LED strips.
The patent literature comprises few relevant documents regarding the control of LED strips. Documents related to micro-LEDs (for example those describing flat panels) have been discarded; involved technologies are different and the interconnection problem does not even exist. In the relevant technical domain of lighting, the patent document U.S. Pat. No. 8,492,983 entitled “System and method to address and control serially connected LEDs” discloses systems and methods for networking and control of lighting systems. In particular, this application relates to the addressing and control of light emitting diodes (LEDs) connected serially on a bus within a network of serially bussed LEDs. The approaches described in the document alleges to “simplify and lower the cost of control by distributing the control functions between a serial bus controller and controllers associated with individual LEDs or LED circuits on the serial bus. Hardware intensive decoding of predefined addresses, or time consuming address processing and determining algorithms, are not employed. Instead, the addressing method disclosed both simplifies the system by reducing hardware requirements and improves the speed of the data packets and reduces packet latency moving down the serial bus”. This approach presents limitations.
There is a need for systems and methods of handling interconnected LEDs' strips.